When you do, you can pinpoint what in your life brings you joy and fulfillment versus angst and anxiety. Take a moment to recognize the feelings that result from various stimuli.
If the phone notifications reminding you of unread email and messages give you a pit in your stomach, its acceptable to turn them off. If the constant reminder of all that is wrong with the world from the news sends you into a tailspin, it’s okay to step away from it. Take note of what triggers your feelings. When our senses are being bombarded, there are several ways to mitigate the risk of overstimulation: 1. However, there are ways to prevent overstimulation. We’re not suggesting that you move to a cave and cut off interaction with the outside world. After all, it’s impossible for us to live and simultaneously avoid the sights, sounds, and experiences of life. While we all know how important focusing is to completing our tasks and achieving our goals, we may not be able to avoid losing our focus because of the various stimuli we encounter. This wasn’t necessarily a good thing, as they believed that the environment both the experienced web surfers and novices were exposed to was one that “promotes cursory reading, hurried and distracted thinking, and superficial learning.” In other words, when our brains are overexposed to stimuli, whether it be through a screen or not, our focus is what falls by the wayside. While their brains looked different initially, when he rescanned their brains several days later, the brains of the novices now looked like the brains of their experienced counterparts. Small studied the brains of six volunteers as they surfed the web, comparing those who were “experienced web surfers” with novices. And as UCLA professor of psychiatry Gary Small once commented, “more brain activity is not necessarily better brain activity.”ĭr. After all, every day we get bombarded by an array of sights, sounds, and information during any activity. Our brains can get overstimulated by anything we’re exposed to.
And as a result, we’re left with feeling anything from mild discomfort like stress or a loss of focus to extreme distress making us feel overwhelmed, full of anxiety, depression or fear. As one article describes it, our brains sometimes receive too much information to process correctly. Sensory overload can happen when any of our senses receives an excessive amount of input. If you find yourself feeling overwhelmed, anxious, or powerless in moments like these, you’re experiencing sensory overstimulation. You can smell your coworker’s lunch heating in the common microwave and you feel like you’re being pressed in on all sides. The noise rattles against the cacophony of your coworkers talking over one another during your Zoom meeting. You’re sitting at your desk when loud chirps from your cellphone make you jump – some app is sending notifications.